Old Master paintings and sculptures realised £51.3m / $68m at Sotheby’s in London on the evening of 1 July 2026 (est. £32.1m to 46.4m), the highest total for an evening of Old Master sales at Sotheby’s London since July 2019 and the third highest in a decade.
The evening opened with the Hamilton Laocoön, a rare early full-scale bronze cast of the legendary antique sculpture, made in Paris in 1817 by Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux. Pursued by four bidders over fifteen minutes, including a private collector from Asia and a Contemporary collector new to the field, it sold in a single-lot sale for £13.6m / $18.1m (est. £2m to 3m), the second highest price for any pre-Modern sculpture at auction and the highest ever paid for a Neoclassical sculpture. Its provenance included William Beckford, the 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, and the Duke of Hamilton.
The adjacent Old Master & 19th Century Paintings and Sculpture sale brought £37.7m / $50m (est. £30.1m to 43.4m), up 160 percent on last July. Nearly a quarter of the lots offered set new records, with 11 auction records in total, including works by Hans Memling, the Master of the Prodigal Son, Bernard van Orley, Cosimo Rosselli, Palma il Vecchio, Foggini, Giovanni Antonio Guardi and Sir Edwin Landseer. Earlier in the day, sales of sculpture and works on paper brought a combined £3.2m / $4.3m.
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn’s Let The Little Children Come Unto Me, a rare early history painting recently restored, sold for £8m / $10.6m (est. £8m to 12m). Sir Edwin Landseer’s monumental Scene in Braemar, the sister painting to The Monarch of the Glen and unseen in public for more than two decades, set a new auction record for the artist at £5.9m / $7.9m (est. £3m to 4m). Hans Memling’s The Virgin Mary Nursing the Christ Child set a new record for the artist at £3.5m / $4.6m (est. £3m to 4m).
Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Village scene with peasants carousing and dancing around a maypole sold for £3m / $4m (est. £2.5m to 3.5m), and Sandro Botticelli and Associate’s The Virgin and Child with the young Saint John the Baptist, one of only two known versions of the Madonna del Roseto, realised £2.5m / $3.4m (est. £2m to 3m).
Nearly 55 percent of lots sold achieved prices in excess of their estimates. Bernard van Orley’s Virgin and Child sold for £2m / $2.7m (est. £1.5m to 2m), a new record for the artist. Ivan Aivazovsky’s Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore achieved £1.5m / $2m (est. £500,000 to 700,000). Giovanni Battista Foggini’s marble reliefs of Christ and the Samaritan Woman; Apollo and Daphne sold for £1.3m / $1.8m (est. £600,000 to 1m). Cosimo Rosselli’s Christ as the Man of Sorrows sold for £960,000 / $1.3m (est. £450,000 to 600,000), a record for the artist.
Palma il Vecchio’s A shepherd and two women set a new record for the artist at £742,000 / $984,237 (est. £600,000 to 800,000). Seven large copper panels depicting The Seven Days of Creation sold for £768,000 / $1m (est. £120,000 to 180,000), over four times the high estimate. Giovanni Antonio Guardi’s The Greek Favourite in the Harem set a record for the artist at £614,400 / $814,541 in its auction debut (est. £200,000 to 300,000). Thomas Gainsborough’s Portrait of Mrs Sloper ‘ Spiritualised’ reached almost four times its high estimate at £230,400 / $305,453 (est. £40,000 to 60,000).
(Press Release)
